Because of You
by Mystic83
Summary: Because of you, I never stray too far from the sidewalk. Because of you, I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt. Because of you, I try my hardest just to forget everything.


Lee Adama sat to the side of the pilots' break room, the next week's flight schedule laid out on the table in front of him. He was finding it easier and easier to fill these things out. It wasn't clear if that was because he was getting better at being CAG or if it was because the pool of pilots he had to work with was getting smaller.

On principle, Lee hated the paperwork and he was sure it only existed so that higher-ups could be certain the CAG was sufficiently busy at all times. He had pilot evaluations to do for the nuggets as they were being promoted to full pilot status, after that his father had requested that he get a jump on the next flight schedule, and finally Kara's half-legible reports on the new batch of nuggets had left much to be desired. He was very unsure if they could hack the training, which meant he would have to evaluate them himself.

Usually he hated how busy he was but on days like today, it just made life easier.

"Hey, Captain!" Hot Dog yelled from a few tables over. "Come join us."

Lee looked up to see Hot Dog, Racetrack, Stinger, and Dee engrossed in another game of triad. For a second, Lee imagined giving in to the luxury of forgetting the massive amount of work lying in front of him and taking a moment's rest. His conscience got the best of him, though, and he shook his head. "Sorry, Hot Dog. I can't. I have work to do."

Le assumed the triad players went back to their game without another thought until he heard Hot Dog mutter "Captain Tight Pants" and the whole table began to snicker under their breaths. He sighed quietly and returned to the flight rotation.

Most of the time, Lee actually found comments like that amusing. Their nickname for him helped bond them together as a group, pilots against CAG, and he saw the value in it. He'd done the same thing once upon a time when life was a lot easier and laughter wasn't so hard to find. Memories like that made the embarrassment of being called Captain Tight Pants sting a little less. Not to mention that he was pretty sure that Kara had come up with this particular moniker, and he had lived through so many of her nicknames that the razzing was starting to lose its effect.

"What _is_ his problem?"

"Stick up his ass since birth."

"I don't think he even knows how to have fun."

Lee's grip on his pen tightened as the words drifted over him. Clearly, they thought he was too engrossed in his work to notice they were still whispering about him. Either that or they had just grown too careless in the wake of the world's end.

"You know what I heard. I heard the CAG had a little brother who was his polar opposite. Couldn't be responsible to save his life, pulled crazy stunts. They say he was in the brig every other day and cracked a joke after every seriously drab sentence his brother said."

"Now why couldn't _he_ have been our CAG?"

Lee threw his pen down onto the table and clamped his jaw to keep him from saying anything. The pilots couldn't know what dangerous ground they were treading. Leaning back in his chair, Lee shut his eyes and let out a deep breath. Maybe one day he'd have the opportunity to explain to them why he was the way he was. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn't. He was CAG, and the rest was none of their business.

In his head, the image of his brother slowly came into focus. Memories of all the times his brother had bailed him out of the brig in Caprica City were the ones he loved to remember on days like today.

It had been like a ritual for them. Lee would do something stupid, pull some ridiculous stunt, and end up under arrest. He would use his one call to reach Zak, who would come down to wherever Lee was being held and yell about what a mistake the police were making and didn't they _know_ they had the son of a Battlestar Commander in their cells?

And every time, Zak's words would put the fear of the gods in the officers holding Lee. The authorities would release him as quickly as they could process him and then he and Zak would walk home the long way while Lee told the story of his latest arrest.

Things were different back then.

It was easier not to care, to deny responsibility for anything other than yourself.

Lee played the words of his pilots through his mind again. They thought he hadn't lived a moment of fun in his whole life but they would be surprised to know the kind of man he had been once. Stunned to learn that Zak Adama looked cookie cutter clean when compared to the legendary delinquency of Lee Adama.

However, that had been before. Before Zak had died and Lee had made a vow to change his life.

Zak had taught him what happened when you risked everything for something you felt was right. Lee had stood by and watched as his little brother proved himself to be a much braver man in so many ways. And yet at times, Zak looked so terrified at where his feelings were taking him.

For years, his brother had come to him, upset because Kara had pushing him away. It happened so often that Lee eventually lost count. Loving such a damaged woman had torn his brother up slowly but surely, and Lee had been the only witness to Zak's pain.

For most of their lives, it had just been Zak and Lee. There had been no one else to support them but each other. Then Kara came along and things shifted. It wasn't like Lee was jealous of the way she took up all of Zak's time. He saw the way Zak looked when she entered a room, and Lee was happy that his brother could have that.

But that didn't mean Lee understood it.

Zak told him he was so in love the pain didn't matter to him. Being with Kara for one second of one day and knowing that being with him made her happy? It was worth all the hard times.

Zak had fallen in love. Lee had never seen anyone fall harder.

In the end, it was Zak's love that drove him to his death before anyone realized what happened.

It had been a hard lesson for Lee to swallow. He still did not understand how something as great as love could be the worst thing that ever happened to you.

It was why he played things so safe. It kept him from getting hurt.

He tried to forget that it kept him from living as well.

"Have you seen how he talks to the Old Man?"

The pilots' voices jolted Lee from his thoughts, and he was surprised to hear they were still talking about him.

"Adama would give the world for his son and all the Captain can do is hate him."

"Did anyone ever find out why?"

"The usual thing probably. Military brats always grow up to hate their daddies."

"Now let's be fair. Apollo doesn't seem the type to hate his father just because he wasn't around."

Lee winced at that. It was nice that Dee was trying to stick up for him, but she had chosen to deny the one point that had some merit to it.

"You haven't seen the way the Old Man looks after the two of them get into it. He's devastated. If I didn't know Adama was such a strong man, I swear he's cry."

Lee's mind flashed back to a memory of when he was little. His father had been on leave, back when he was still married to Caroline Adama and actually spent his leaves at home. Lee had fallen down and skinned his knee in the backyard. To this day, he couldn't remember a pain that intense. Within moments of the accident, his father had picked him up off the ground and sat him down on a nearby tree stump. As he bandaged Lee up, William Adama told his son that crying was a sign of weakness. A real Adama man did not cry.

In retrospect, Lee knew that his father was just trying to toughen him up like all fathers did for their sons.

The look that William Adama had given him as they stood on opposite sides of Zak's casket on the day of his funeral conveyed the same message.

Crying shows weakness.

And Adamas are not weak.

From that moment on, Lee forced a smile whenever people offered their condolences and a laugh when they tried to do their part in taking away the pain. Every day of his life, from that point on, was a complete fraud.

It actually didn't hurt that much. His heart couldn't break any more by pretending to be something he wasn't, not when the loss of the most important person in his life had already torn it in two.

"Lee? Are you okay?"

Kara's voice pulled him away from his thoughts, and he blinked at her. It was weird. She actually looked concerned. He didn't feel his usual wariness at her approach. For a change it didn't feel like she was about to set him up to take a punch, physically or psychologically, which was the norm for them.

"I'm fine. Why?"

"Today," she answered, shrugging her shoulders.

"What about it?" Lee asked as he tried to be casual in his response.

"Don't pretend like you don't remember what today is," Kara said, arching her eyebrow at him.

"It's doesn't matter. Every day marks the death of someone's loved one in this Fleet. What makes today any more special than those days?"

"Just another day to remember the dead?"

"Just another day," he assured her.

She shook her head. "Nope. I don't buy it." She leaned down on the table. "You know why? Because today is your day and it's mine and it's the Old Man's. That's what makes it different."

"I have work to do," Lee muttered, turning back to his paperwork.

"Same old Lee," Kara said, rolling her eyes. "Maybe one of these days you'll follow my example and learn to live for those that don't. Try to have a little fun, Lee. He would want that for you.."

After a moment of stony silence, she sighed and reached down to lay her hand on his. "You know where I'll be, Lee. Please, don't make yourself go through this alone."

He watched her leave the room without another word before turning back to the flight schedule. She had given him that look again, the one that whispered of things never said but always felt, and this time it almost broke him.

"I think they're sleeping together."

Ah. The pilots again. Lee wondered how much Triad was actually being played on the other side of the room.

"No. No way would Starbuck go for a guy as sexually repressed as him."

Sexually repressed? This was getting out of hand.

Laughing was the last thing Lee felt like dong right now, but after that a comment like that, he was finding himself hard pressed to hold it in. The comment was just so _completely _wrong and his pilots would realize that too, if they actually took the time to get to know him as something other than CAG.

If they only knew what had gotten him sent to the brig on Zak's eighteenth birthday, they would think twice about calling him sexually repressed. In fact, they might even declare his behavior crazier than Kara's where conquests and notches on the bedpost were concerned.

After all, it had been him, and not Starbuck, caught with his pants down in a commemorative Viper from the first Cylon War after its donation to the Delphi Museum.

With President Adar's daughter.

"Have you seen the way he pushes her?"

"I think he's the only person on board that can reduce Starbuck to tears."

"It's like he has no concept that she's an actual woman. With feelings and everything."

"I heard she was in love with the CAG's little brother."

"She probably broke down at the funeral, and he probably didn't shed a tear."

"Hey. Come on, people! I think we're getting a little crazy here. Lee's a good man, no matter what the rumors say."

That was Dee again, defending him to the masses. At least this time she was right.

"I don't care what you think. The guy is an unfeeling bastard."

"But the type who wouldn't cry at his own brother's funeral?"

"Yeah. That type."

It took all of Lee's willpower not to march across the room, pick Stinger up by his throat, and slam him into the wall. He could take the taunts about the stick up his ass and the comments about his behavior toward his father. Hell, he could even take the rumors that he was fraking Kara.

But to insinuate that he wasn't upset by Zak's death?

These people really had no clue who or what he was.

Lee had kept his pain locked up inside him because his father had taught him to. He had kept in the tears at Zak's funeral and stood next to his mother, comforting her. He had locked eyes with Kara and wished he could be in two places at once. There was just too much pain all around him, and he hadn't known what to do. As the memory of Kara's face that day hit him, Lee closed his eyes again and lowered his own face into his hands.

He laid in bed night after night following Zak's funeral, listening to the sounds of her crying through the walls between his room and Zak's. His mother had offered Kara a place to stay until her leave was up, and naturally she chose to stay in Zak's room instead of the guest bedroom. That little indulgence put the woman his brother had risked everything to love six inches away from him. The little bits of plaster and drywall did nothing to muffle the noise.

And then one night it got to be too much.

He had knocked softly on the door of his little brother's room but didn't wait for her to answer. In the moments that followed, they both let go of the little strength they had left and found comfort in each other's arms.

It was wrong.

It was inappropriate.

It helped.

When the morning came and his mother found them together in Zak's bed, she hadn't said a word. The look of disgust in her eyes was enough. She slammed the door and Lee turned to look at Kara. His heart broke. Her face showed nothing. It was as if she couldn't register the mistake they had made or the fact that they had been caught.

The reality of the situation hit him hard. Kara hadn't cared that he was hurting, that he had lost Zak, too. She had used him to get rid of her pain for a few hours without noticing the way he had cried along with her as he held her. Kara couldn't think of anyone's pain but her own as her whole life collapsed. Lee became a last ditch effort to hold on to something real. Anything from the life she had before. She stared at him and something in her eyes scared him to death. All Lee could think was that he was too young, too young to have someone depend on him so much.

He lost all trust in himself, and before long, he found it hard to trust anyone around him. Something irreparably damaged inside of him that morning. At least that was what he thought.

He and Kara stopped talking that day.

Because of her, because of what Kara had unknowingly done to him, he had done his best to forget everything. He threw himself into his military career, into keeping up his assignments so that there could never be a chance of reassignment to anything within fifty yards of the Galactica. Everyone knew that Galactica was retiring and the washouts, the frak-ups, were the only personnel assigned to it now, and Lee was neither.

On top of that, he knew he didn't have the energy to face either one of his demons right now. There were things bubbling at the surface that he never wanted to face.

Kara had exposed in him a fear that had never surfaced in all those years of laughing and joking with Zak. She had revealed the reason that Zak was willing to risk everything and fly so close to the sun. Lee had let her in that night, and it had burned, marking him forever.

Since that night, he had been afraid to let anyone else in.

The silence persisted until the day he showed up on Galactica for its decommissioning. At first, neither one mentioned what had happened, too afraid to say what they felt they had to. Then the Cylons attacked and the world as they knew it was over. After that, they made a silent pact to move past that night because there wasn't much left of their world and they needed each other

And so Kara lived up to her reputation as the hard-headed, loud-mouthed but brilliant pilot who flew on talent and instinct alone while Lee let himself be pigeonholed into the role of stiff CAG who only cared about the job at hand.

The few flashes of his old self that ever surfaced occurred when he was with Kara. She would say something, do something, that reminded him of that night two long years before. It would be a small moment when she looked at him with tears in her eye, and he would feel himself begin to crack. She would make a joke that reminded him of Zak and how much his little brother and Kara had loved each other. Then he would remember how much he had learned to love Kara through his little brother. And her face would melt as she remembered, too.

That was when the heartless insults came without mercy. He had to push her away, to forget who she had been and remember what she was. Most times it killed him to cause her such intentional pain after all she had been through. But the alternative wasn't something he could indulge in. Because if his resolve broke, for even one second, then all would be lost.

He would be lost.

Because of her.

He was ashamed of his life. He was ashamed of how empty it had become while he had been too preoccupied trying to keep safe, to keep from being burned. He was ashamed of the way he had come to love Kara. How it seemed wrong to want one woman so much when there were so many people who couldn't feel anything anymore. He was ashamed of the way he had to hang on to his old habits, the ones he had ruthlessly constructed over the past two years to keep himself at a distance.

"Do you think he can hear us?"

Lee had forgotten that he was still in the pilot's break room. He opened his eyes slowly to see the four triad players sneaking covert glances at where he sat. He gave them a tight smile and a nod.

"You sure you don't want to be dealt in?" Hot Dog asked again.

Lee stared at them for a moment, these four people who had gotten everything about him so very wrong. And he felt a little piece of the wall crumble. It wouldn't hurt to let them in just a little bit. He would just push them back out tomorrow.

"No thanks," he said, standing and shuffling the papers into a pile. "There's somewhere I have to be."

"Don't you have work to do?" Racetrack asked, sarcasm heavy in her voice. Lee noticed that she didn't even bother to look up from her hand.

"It would have been my brother's birthday today," Lee told them as he grabbed his papers up and pulled them in close to him. "And if you don't mind, I'm going to spend some time remembering him with my father and Lieutenant Thrace."

Lee didn't stick around to see their reactions or hear the comments they made next. The pilots had a right to say things about him. He had done nothing to indicate that he was any different from what he appeared to be. Moreover, he wasn't sure if he ever could.

It was the one of the lessons the three important people in his life had taught him

Somewhere inside of him, Lee had always known that sometimes being strong was the best defense against a world that crumbles when you try to make sense of it. His past had taught him that weaknesses might be exploited but strength can cause you so much more pain.

Strength coupled with silence that you can't seem to break is even worse. The silence lets you go on pretending, but the fear that one day you'll forget the things you've felt because you never formed them into words? It's always there. The fear that one day you will fail to recall the things that hurt so much to learn. The things that burned themselves into you even as the physical pain subsided.

Letting someone in will burn you, but sometimes the burn is worth the pain. When you love someone, you accept that one day they will leave you a little emptier inside. People come and people go. Love fades.

Lee Adama has learned that the hard way.

Because of them.


End file.
